Surface coatings are often applied to articles such as engine cylinder bores for an internal combustion engine. In one application, a thermal spray gun moves to coat a stationary surface, sometimes with several passes to build a desirable thickness for the coating. However, thermal spray coating method has been met with limited use partly due to variations or lack of uniformity in coating thickness. As a result, additional passes of the thermal spray gun may be needed to reduce the thickness variation, which may cause an overloading of the coating material. One disadvantage associated with overloading of the coating material is relatively high consumption of the coating material, which may increase production costs.